The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two

by Michele Jaffe

  Crispin was frowning slightly, running through the inventory of old women in his head. “What did she look like?”

  “It is hard to say. She was hunched over slightly and wore a hood. But when she grabbed me in the alley, I was able to see her eyes, and I had never seen anything like them.”

  “Let me guess,” Crispin said, and felt a faint tingling at the base of his spine, “they were gold.”

  “Yes,” Sophie nodded. “How did you know?”

  “Because she was here the night of the fire and stayed to help put it out. And I have seen her several times outside of Sandal Hall.”

  “Who do you think she is?”

  “I can’t say. We’ll have to ask her next time we see her.” Crispin’s voice was distant, and his eyes were looking past Sophie. Thinking about the fire had reminded him of something he needed to tell her. Something hard.

  Thinking about the fire had reminded Sophie of something too. The night of the fire was the night she knew she loved Crispin. If only—

  “Sophie,” Crispin announced in a strange voice, abruptly breaking into her thoughts. “Sophie, there is something I want to tell you.”

  Sophie looked at him intently. Her heart was pounding. “Yes, Crispin?”

  “Sophie, I—” He broke off.

  Sophie smiled up at him, encouraging him, pleading with him to say the words she wanted more than anything to hear. “Yes, Crispin? What is it?”

  Crispin took a deep breath and blurted it out. “Sophie, I killed your brother. Damon. I killed him. Two and a half years ago.”

  Sophie’s reaction was worse than Crispin had anticipated. She pulled away from him, a look of painful shock on her face. “What are you talking about? Damon? My brother? What do you know about Damon?”

  “I did not do this very well,” Crispin stated as much to himself as to her. “I am sorry. Basil Grosgrain told me about Damon. About your past. About who you were before the fire.”

  “Basil? How did he know?” The look of shock had not receded.

  “He hired someone to find out. He had nothing to do with the counterfeiting, but he thought you killed his father and he hired someone to investigate you. He was trying to convince me as well. But what I meant to say, Sophie, is that I am sorry. I understand if, after knowing that I killed your brother, you might feel differently about me.”

  Sophie stayed very quiet for a time. “How did it happen?” she asked finally. “How did you kill him?”

  “He was part of the first counterfeiting operation that I uncovered. He shot at me, and I had to shoot back. Unfortunately for him, I was the better shot.”

  “Then he is dead? Really dead?” Crispin nodded. “Thank god,” Sophie whispered, so softly that Crispin was not sure he had heard her correctly.

  “What?” he asked, a lump forming in his throat.

  “I said, thank god.” Sophie looked at him again now. “Thank god he is dead. And thank god you survived. I cannot imagine a life without you, Crispin.”

  “But Damon—” Crispin began.

  “Damon was the man who kept me in the attic. The man who tormented me. By the end, he was no longer my brother. He was a monster. I have lived under the shadow of the nightmare he created for years. Until you came along.”

  “Then you do not want to leave me?” Crispin asked cautiously.

  Sophie shook her head. “Crispin, I never want to leave you.”

  “But before, you pulled away from me like you hated me,” he pointed out.

  “You surprised me. I thought—I was expecting you to say something else.”

  “Oh.”

  Sophie resettled herself in the crook of his arm and listened to the sound of water trickling off the statue of Venus at the far end of the bath and told herself she did not need Crispin to love her. She was repeating this for the tenth time when Crispin’s voice roused her from her thoughts.

  “About the bet,” he began.

  Sophie frowned at him. “I do not believe there is anything left to discuss, my lord. The winner is clear.”

  “I am glad we agree.” Crispin sank into the water up to his chin. “Lucky for you, I am a good winner.”

  Sophie’s frown deepened. “It would be lucky for me, if you had won, but since I won you will be made to suffer. I am a terrible winner.”

  “But I won. You said you knew it was Constantia at noon. I knew hours before that.”

  “You cannot prove it. And besides, it is moot. I have won.”

  “You cannot just decree that.”

  “Yes”—Sophie grinned, her spirits rising—“I can. The Fates were on my side.”

  “Fates? That is like saying The Aunts were on your side. That is not conclusive.”

  “Conclusive?” she queried. “I can make it conclusive.” She was just about to step out of the bath when Thurston cleared his throat from behind the lavender hedge.

  “Good evening, my lord, Miss Champion,” Thurston said as if there were nothing the least bit unusual about addressing his sootcovered master and mistress through a hedge. “I took the liberty of removing these from the safe and bringing them to you. I thought you might want them.” He extended around the lavender bush a silver tray on which lay two folded pieces of paper, then disappeared.

  Sophie splashed to the side of the bath to grab the papers, then seated herself right next to Crispin.

  She looked at him seriously. “As I recall, the terms of the bet were that we each wrote down our deepest secret desire, and whoever won got whatever was on their paper. Do you agree, my lord?”

  Crispin nodded, equally seriously, and she handed him the paper, neatly folded in fours, on which she had written what felt like years earlier. “Read it,” she commanded him.

  “ ‘I desire you to go naked to your next audience with Queen Elizabeth,’ ” Crispin read out. Then he looked at her. He was momentarily speechless with surprise.

  “You see,” Sophie said, bobbing up and down next to him gleefully. “You see, I did win. Because I have already gotten what I wrote on the paper.”

  Crispin just sat and shook his head. “I can’t believe you asked for that,” he said as much to himself as to her.

  Sophie smiled widely. “Do not forget that you had just made me strip. It seemed only fair at the time. Didn’t you wonder why I said I could not marry you until after the bet was settled? I would never want my husband to do such a thing.”

  “Of course not.” Crispin nodded with mock solemnity, looking with slightly misty eyes at his bride-to-be. “It would hardly do. Your husband must be a paragon.”

  “Exactly,” Sophie confirmed. “Now, what did you ask for?”

  Crispin shook his head absently and crumpled his paper. “Given that you won, I don’t see that it matters.”

  “Come on, Crispin, show me what you wrote,” Sophie said playfully, reaching for the paper, but her playfulness vanished when he resumed speaking.

  “I would rather not. I do not think, with our marriage coming up, it would be good for you to know. For either of us. Besides, I wrote it days ago. When we had only just met.”

  Sophie felt suddenly hollow. After several long moments had passed in silence, she asked, “Crispin, have you ever been in love?”

  Crispin nodded but did not look at her. “Once.”

  “Did it happen slowly? Or all at once like a lightning shock?”

  “All at once,” Crispin answered without hesitation. “I fell in love with her the first time I set eyes on her.”

  “Did she love you back?” Sophie asked.

  Crispin nodded again. “She said she did. Although I think it took her a little longer.”

  Sophie wondered about the idiocy of a woman who would not fall instantly in love with Crispin, but kept these thoughts to herself. “Was she beautiful?”

  Crispin shook his head. “No. She was beyond beautiful. She was extraordinary.”

  “Oh.” Sophie did not like this w
oman, she decided. Not at all. “Was she intelligent?”

  Crispin smiled to himself. “Sometimes. Other times she could be blind.”

  “When?” Sophie asked, glad to hear her rival had a weakness.

  “Well, when someone was trying to tell her he loved her, for example.”

  Sophie looked sage. “That must have been hard for you.”

  “Actually, I found it quite entertaining,” Crispin replied, but Sophie only half heard. A battle was raging in her head, one side telling her it was better not to learn the identity of Crispin’s true love, the other knowing that she would never rest until she found out.

  “Who is she?” Sophie blurted finally. “I promise not to interfere, if that is what you are worried about, but I cannot live without knowing.”

  “You honestly want me to tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really do not think this is a good idea,” Crispin said seriously.

  “Please, Crispin.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Very well.” Crispin retrieved the paper he had crumpled and handed it to her.

  Sophie took a large breath for courage, then unfolded it with trembling fingers. And felt her heart burst as she read:

  YOU

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The river garden of Sandal Hall sparkled with the light of almost a thousand candles and torches. Tents of translucent white gauze embroidered with exotic flowers in bold hues dotted the grass, their sides blowing gently in the evening breeze. The sun was just setting, painting the sky pink and purple behind the hushed and expectant crowd facing the wide back door.

  Sophie looked down at them from the second-floor window of Crispin’s apartments and felt the sudden urge to flee. “No,” she said, stepping backward and nearly tripping over her dress. “No, I do not think today is the right day.”

  “What are you talking about?” Octavia demanded, swooping down to rescue Sophie’s hem from being trampled under its unappreciative wearer’s feet.

  “I think tomorrow might be a better day. Look outside. Doesn’t it look like it might rain?”

  Emme, seated in the window embrasure, shook her head. “You might be right, Sophie. I think there is a cloud hovering somewhere over the Kingdom of Sweden.”

  Octavia took hold of Sophie’s hand and turned toward her. “Sophie, what is the matter? I thought you wanted to marry Crispin.”

  “I did. I do,” Sophie went on. “But what if he does not want to marry me? What if he is just doing it because he made the promise and is too honorable to break it?”

  “A very good point,” Emme agreed. “What if he had amnesia when he asked you and forgot that he was already married. Or what if he is not the Earl of Sandal at all but just a cobbler that looks like him and—”

  “Enough,” Octavia pronounced, struggling not to smile. “Sophie, you know that is not the case. You know he wants to marry you.”

  “Maybe,” Sophie conceded. “But what if the other Arboretti, his brother and cousins, hate me?”

  Octavia shook her head. “They won’t hate you.”

  Sophie ignored her. “What if they are all very prim and proper and think that I am unladylike and unmannerly?”

  “They would be right,” Octavia pronounced matter-of-factly.

  Sophie had just turned to her friend, eyes wide with disbelief, when there was a knock on the door. Before anyone could say anything, a blond head, followed by a small body, appeared.

  “Are you Miss Champion?” the blond head asked in slightly accented English. When Sophie nodded, she rushed toward her, smiling enormously. “I am Bianca. Your sister-in-law. I could not wait to meet you. You are even more beautiful than Crispin described, and he used many, many adjectives. Not to mention the letters from Lawrence Pickering. Your dress is spectacular, extraordinary.” She turned toward the other two women in the room. “You must be Octavia and Emme. I have heard so much about all of you I—”

  “Don’t be alarmed by my wife,” Ian said, striding into the room. “She always talks this much when she is excited.”

  “May I present, Ian, Crispin’s brother and my husband,” Bianca introduced. Noticing the other three tall men who had unceremoniously pushed their way into the room, she continued, pointing to each in turn. “And Miles, Tristan, and Sebastian, Crispin’s notorious cousins.”

  “You know very well that we prefer the word ‘illustrious,’ Bianca,” Tristan chided her. “We would not want Miss Champion to get the wrong idea about us.”

  “Please, call me Sophie,” Sophie just managed to say, completely overwhelmed by her new company.

  “Sophie,” Sebastian repeated with a nod and a smile, then leaned toward her confidentially. “Tell us, Sophie, is it true that you were wearing a mustache when you and Crispin met?”

  After hesitating for a moment, Sophie nodded.

  “And that you saved a dozen women from prison?” Bianca wanted to know.

  “I—I suppose,” Sophie stammered, fairly certain that neither talking about her tendency to wear male hairpieces nor talking about her prison record would improve her standing with the Arboretti.

  “I didn’t save anyone when I was in prison,” Bianca confided, clearly in awe.

  “You did come home with a new steward,” Ian pointed out, his mock exasperation overlaid with loving amusement. “But I don’t suppose Sophie wants to spend her wedding day hearing about all of that. There will be years for us to exhaust her with our boring tales.”

  “Boring?” Tristan was aghast. “Speak for yourself. My stories are never boring.”

  “Bah. That one about the Raphael painting that you liberated from the collection of the Duchess of Montecastello by feeding her dogs brandy and cookies while you hung suspended by your ankles in her fireplace is definitely boring,” Sebastian said with an exaggerated yawn.

  Sophie looked from one to the other of the smiling faces surrounding her, and felt—as she had often in recent days—as though she were in a wonderful dream. Someone else’s wonderful dream, a dream of such staggering marvelousness that it could never belong to Sophie Champion.

  She struggled to find the proper words to tell her visitors how overwhelmed she was, but nothing seemed right. Instead, she managed to come out with, “It is a real pleasure to meet all of you.”

  “I assure you, the pleasure is wholly ours,” Ian replied with an earnestness that gave the words more meaning than mere social niceties. Then he crossed the room toward her and, taking both her hands warmly in his, said, “Welcome to our family, Sophie. We have been waiting for you.”

  Unbeknownst to him, unbeknownst even to her, Ian had just spoken the words that Sophie had been longing to hear for eleven years.

  The group crowding around the base of the main staircase in the entrance hall of Sandal Hall grew silent at a sign from Thurston.

  “Breathe,” Ian leaned over to whisper to Crispin, who nodded but completely disregarded his brother’s good advice. He would not breathe or swallow or even move again until he saw Sophie and knew that she really was going to marry him.

  A door on the first landing opened, and Bianca appeared, followed by Helena, then Emme, then Octavia. What Crispin calculated to be roughly six hundred years passed, and then, all of a sudden, she was there.

  Sophie seemed to float above them, shimmering splendidly from head to foot. She was an incredible vision, too beautiful to be mortal, blushing too strongly to be anything else. Her gown was of deep ocean blue, and turned her eyes that color too. The skirt was completely embroidered with mermaids and mermen dancing together while sea creatures played among them, their hair and bodies picked out in diamonds and pearls and emeralds to make them shimmer as if underwater. The underskirt was a lighter shade of blue, cut to move like ripples of water, with small diamonds and aquamarines careful
ly set in so it glistened like the surface of the sea at dawn, and the same stones formed a small bee on the hem of the gown. There was no question that the dress was Octavia’s masterpiece, but it was not that which caused Crispin to lose his tongue. It was the way Sophie looked in it, and, even more, the way she was looking at him.

  Crispin looked back at her and said in a voice that carried out to the crowds in the streets, “Sophie Champion, I love you.”

  The cheering that began then did not end until well after dawn. Description of the wedding of the Earl of Scandal to Miss Sophie Champion took up eight pages of the newly reopened News at Court (“under the proprietorship of Lady Priscilla Snowden and her sister, Lady Eleanor Nearview, Aunts to the Earl of Sandal”), which featured descriptions of everything from the food that was consumed (“a notable preponderance of orange cakes”) to a transcript of the Queen’s remarks on the occasion (which included such sagacities as “Very fine wine, Sandal,” and “Where do you suppose he had these cushions made?”). A half page was given over to an impromptu monologue performed by a raven named Grip from the window of His Lordship’s chambers, apparently on the topic of slugs, and another half to a listing of “Women Claiming to Have Had Their Lives Saved by Sophie Champion.” A pageant performed by members of a patriotic association called the Worshipful Hall (“unknown to the Proprietors”), which raised a few eyebrows when all the dancing boys turned out to be dancing girls, received three quarters of a page, but by far the longest segment was entitled “A Report of What Transpired at Midnight.”

  It was just slightly short of that hour when Thurston, standing in front of a planting shed off to the side of the Sandal Hall gardens, cleared his throat. “Good evening, my lord, my lady,” he said, as if there were nothing at all unusual about seeking a renegade bride and groom in the outbuildings of their own garden during their wedding. “I did not like to bother you, but this was just delivered, and the messenger says it is urgent.”

  Crispin appeared from around the shed first, wiping a smudge of dirt from his ear, and Sophie followed, trying not to blush furiously. She looked over Crispin’s shoulder as he slit open the parcel.